Word: caesar
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Anyone who thinks the theater of the absurd is extinct need only attend the Brooklyn Academy of Music's production of Julius Caesar to behold it rampant on a field of idiocy. Director Frank Dunlop's conception of the play is so aberrant, so devoid of all sense and meaning, that when it does not border on the ludicrous it achieves the inane...
...great stage of Rome. Dunlop has given us a Rome sans populace, sans armies, and devoid of the pervasive presence of megalopolitan power-perhaps the most potent character in the drama. The Roman state is what stalks the minds and characters of the men who conspire to kill Caesar. It is never remotely felt here...
...inconsiderable gifts in stagecraft, seems either to have missed or ignored the moral point of the play. Rome is at the flash point at which a republic blazes into tyranny. Into the crucible of history, the conspirators, and especially Brutus, pour the proposition that evil means (the assassination of Caesar) justify good ends (the preservation of the citizens' freedom). And history, time and time again, has verified the answer proffered by the play: the ends never justify the means; the means degrade and become the ends...
Mercy should grace any description of the performers, but it is difficult to be charitable while they are stabbing Shakespeare to death. George Rose is comfortable in Caesar's tunic, yet when he dies in the Forum, the event carries no more dramatic gravity than if Robert Morley were to be silenced midway in a British Airways commercial...
...country he did so much to create; it is just as well that the honor escaped him. When Jefferson once remarked that he thought the greatest men in history were Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke, Hamilton replied that, no, the greatest man who ever lived was Caesar...